


Three-sentence fics

by Heliopause



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, English and Scottish Popular Ballads - Francis James Child, Mansfield Park - Jane Austen, Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 12:04:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heliopause/pseuds/Heliopause
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These were written in March and December 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ramandu's daughter, Caspian's wife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from wingedflight21: Narnia, anyone, water tastes sweet at the end of the world

Daughterly duty kept her there, and it was right that she stayed, and it was right that she left when she did, to take up her new wifely, queenly duties. She does not resent it, not really, not bitterly.  
Nevertheless, the question nags at her, especially when she sees how lightly her shining husband esteems his great privilege: why, when she lived so close, all her life, did she never venture to find and taste those strong, sweet waters for herself?


	2. 'The mind, that ocean...'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from metonomia: Narnia, Sea-Girl, first sight

One time, there came one of those things she had heard of, a darkness gliding above her as silently as the great whales would glide. She dared then to look up, to see how they looked, these strange ones who fled the sweet enfolding waters to dwell by choice above, in parching, searing air.

Their eyes met, and an ocean-swelling rush of pure love surged in her, and in both of them, she knew, indelibly.


	3. After the end of the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from rthstewart: Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader: the one he left behind

He met Pittencream again, years later, when he travelled to Calormen, sifting the whole world for any clue at all as to his vanished son. They brought him to the old, mad sailor, whose ravings they took, in Calormene style, to be the oracles of a god-touched, and the madman peered at him, sidelong, mumbling "cold, horrible... alone... alone in the dark with them silent men".  
But Caspian remembered the table at the World's End, where Pittencream had been left solitary, and turned away, desolate.


	4. Prompt from Betony: Narnia, Cor/Aravis, marriage negotiations

"It seems Ahoshta has demanded vile and brutal reparations from my father!"  
Cor took the letter from her, gently, and asked "Why do we need to even think any more about negotiating with a man who has declared you are no longer his daughter?"  
"Because Ahoshta is making a grab for Calavar, to ruin my father and seize the whole of my little brother's patrimony, and I will _not_ let that happen!'


	5. Paleontological dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from metonomia: Narnia/The Ruin, Eustace and Jill, city of the giants:

It was two years later, when he ought to have been studying for his A-levels,that she caught him doodling, and recognised it as a rough plan of the Ruined City, with the underground passages sketched in, provisionally.  
"What on earth are you doing?" she demanded.  
"Ohhh... just thinking how great it'd be, to be able to go back there, and _excavate!_ "


	6. Prompt from with-rainfall: Any, any character/dragon, sparks

It took days, but in between scouting across the island looking for a good mast-tree, Eustace practised, over quiet pools where he couldn't possibly start a fire and do more damage. It was probably the best day of his dragonhood, when he was able to illustrate Reep's story-telling, just for him, privately, by drawing pictures in blown, swift-flying sparks.

He rather regretted losing that bit, when he was made a boy again.


	7. Lady Isabel's rede

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from betonyb: Child Ballads, Janet (Tam Lin) & Lady Isabel (Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight), advice

Burd Janet, Burd Janet, I bid you 'ware  
of him you call Tam Lin,  
for a' he has a bonny face,  
a devil lurks within.

If e'er you go to Carterha'  
Go wi' a loose-sewn sleeve,  
that from your arm the sleeve may fa'  
If he should ask no leave.

If he should tak' you by the sleeve,  
the de'il ca'ed Tam Lin,  
Burd Janet, I bid you heed my rede  
and keep a knife within.


	8. Prompt from ailavyn siniyash: Narnia, Mr. or Mrs. Pevensie, and then what happened?

The ship swung slowly closer and closer, surging with a majestic inexorability to the waiting wharf, where the tiny figures of sons, daughter, sister, brothers were waiting, waving, to the mother and sister returning after so long away.

"They've grown!" Helen sighed under her breath, thinking _grown and changed, and grown away from me; the war has made us all strangers, even this Susan who stayed under my wing, so how much more these other three?_

"They're so small," Susan murmured, thinking _there is so much they don't know about surviving when you're all alone, and you have to shut everything up inside, with everyone, everywhere, every single day_.


	9. Département de Mansfield Park

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from tiny white hats: any,any, political AU

Edmund Bertram fumed at the obligatory raising of the tricoleur on the first anniversary of the Jour de Gloire et de Victoire; his father's absurd and unrealistic folly in allowing Tom and the local militia to make a stand against the advancing Napoleonic forces had resulted in great damage to the house and grounds, and even though he was now the only heir, it was to a much-diminished property.

Nor was Fanny much help; instead of standing by his side, as she ought to be, assuring the département authorities of their total support of the Empire (because, after all, what was a paltry kingdom compared to an empire?) she was off again dabbling in "art" with the infuriating Mary Crawford, and would come home, he supposed, covered with ink from their absurd experiments in " making engravings".

In the small back room at the Parsonage, Mary looked up from her careful calculations of numbers supporting, numbers opposing, and potential weak points of the administration, to exchange a glance, half-amused and half-admiring, with her brother, at the sight of Fanny, inky, sweating, and fiercely focussed on the little handpress, stamping out copy after copy of her latest broadside, _Albion, Arise!_


	10. He will have a new name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from winged flight: Narnia, Eustace/Jill, chasing memories

"Scrubb, Scrubb..." she said, and clenched her fists to try to not let her voice get wobbly again, "I know it was real, and it would help me so much, back here, if I could only remember it as real as it was, especially... you know... Aslan, what he said, and how it felt to be with him, and I try, I really try, and I just can't; it's all getting blurry in my mind."

Eustace grimaced, because that was what time did: it settled down like fine dust over memories of things and times and meetings once so clear and sharp and precious, little by little, and eventually was going to turn everything, he supposed, into a grey blur.

"I think," he began, heavily, "that it's just the way things are right now, and we just have to put up with it, but - do you remember that sleeping giant, called Time? - I sometimes think that when he wakes, and stands up in the open air, really awake, then maybe all the dust will fall off, and the precious things will come sharp and clear and alive again, maybe."


	11. Sigh no more, ladies...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from betonyb: _Much Ado About Nothing_ , Beatrice's mother, "No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, and then a star danced, under that was I born"--what ever happened to her?

If Hero had been a boy, then Balthasar would have been the bastard child installed about the house to keep the little heir company, Beatrice reflected; to that extent she was born under a lucky star. Poor Balthasar - he was called _son_ and _cousin_ , but treated as a useful servingman/musician, using what skills his mother had taught him to sing the song she had made in bitter satire against her 'patron'.

 _Sigh no more!_ \- well, her own mother had neither sighed nor sung, thought Beatrice, but had, by Ursula's account, cried and struggled bitterly against her casting-off, as a mistress inconveniently pregnant at the same time as Leonato's wife.


	12. "All that foul brood..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from wingedflight21: Narnia, Lucy & Tumnus, ghost-hunters

"It must be this one," Tumnus said, wheezing a little, as much from his gathering fear as from the dust raised in his cave by the myriad books already ransacked and discarded.

He passed the book to Lucy's eager reaching hands, and closed his eyes as she read aloud, exultantly: "A ritual to infallibly disclose to the view foul Spectres and Lych-Horrors".

She was already so much changed by the drive to destroy the remnants of the Witch's army, to stamp out, as the High King had said, all that foul brood; what might she become, he wondered, if they followed this path to its end?


	13. Mene, mene...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from psyche29: Narnia, Rabadash, Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin "You are weighed in the balance, and found wanting."

The Tisroc greeted his northern guests with remote courtesy, affecting not to see - as he had 'not seen' these twenty-eight years! - their covert snipings and sneers at him, as at a man and sovereign humiliated, unable even to go to war.  
So be it: let them weigh him and judge him trivial, a thing of no account.  
But he in his turn could judge, and he saw that Narnia's brief flowering was even now withering, without those Four; it would not be long before she was light as dust, next to the gathering strength of her neighbours, and then - oh, _then_ he would be a thing of no account indeed, a carefully neutral bystander and trader, as the weight of other armies fell on Narnia.


End file.
